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Creative Operations 101
Why Does Creative Operations Matter?
Creative operations is essential for managing and improving creative team workflows. Creative teams often work on tight deadlines, with countless media elements, and several points of review, editing, and iteration, to get a project just right. That means that there is a high volume of variables at play with little time to address each variable properly.
If creative operations is not implemented in this unforgiving environment, chaos ensues. Teams inevitably miscommunicate, miss deadlines, run over budget, and overwork each other. Most importantly, there is little time to effectively audit license compliance or tech stack efficacy, which are bound to be lacking.
It seems obvious that all creative teams need to implement creative operations. And every team does, at some level, even if they don’t call it creative ops. However, merely establishing creative operations doesn’t guarantee it will work. To ensure efficiency, leaders must understand that creative ops continually evolves and improves to meet new challenges.
Creative teams can use creative ops to implement structured processes, leverage the right tools in their tech stacks, and maintain effective communication and collaboration. This creates the conditions for teams to deliver high-quality, on-time results consistently, and at a lower cost. It also improves insight into licensing complexities that plague many creative projects, which also saves time and money in the long run, and provides a path to developing a winning, laudable reputation.
Ultimately, creative operations software provides the necessary framework to streamline workflows, manage digital assets, and track performance, ensuring that creative teams can focus on what they do best—creating—while limiting inefficiency, legal, financial, and reputation risks to the larger organization. Over the past few years, rapid changes to work environments have made choosing the right software paramount to successful creative operations.
There are clear benefits to robust creative ops, but there are challenges as well. Let’s explore both.
Who Manages Creative Operations?
Over the past few years, the role of Creative Ops Manager has become increasingly prevalent across industries. Some larger companies have invested heavily in centralizing their creative operations, with Director and Chief Officer titles added to consolidate processes for increased efficiency and more oversight.
Yet different teams handle creative ops decision-making in different ways. While a singular, clearly titled role may be ideal, it’s not always possible given different creative team sizes and structures.
Many smaller teams will see creative operations become the responsibility of a manager, or even an individual contributor with a knack for organizational, “big picture” thinking. In teams that desperately need better creative operations, these individuals see the issues at hand clearly, and often find themselves volunteering to provide solutions, even if it’s a far departure from their job description. Other teams may find themselves hammering out operational processes and tech stacks through group discussion. Many teams will also outsource creative operations strategy: hiring a consultant to examine and redefine their processes and tools.
Whether or not there’s a dedicated management role and title for creative ops, teams must always rise to the occasion of optimizing their creative operations for the sake of managing inefficiency, legal, financial, and reputation risks.
